Vudu might be on to something with its new promotion: “Stay in. Rent four movies for the price of 1 gallon gas!” At today’s prices for movie tickets, concession snacks, and the cost of gas for getting to and from the theater, a family of four could easily spend upwards of a $100 for a night out at the movies. Staying at home and watching movie rentals means you’ll miss out on the latest releases, but a quick gander at Vudu’s catalog shows that its rental offerings include many A-list titles, including some films

Intel is planning to launch a 45nm quad-core CPU Core 2 Quad Q8200 with a core frequency of 2.33GHz and price of US$224 in thousand-unit tray quantities by the end of August along with a new dual-core Pentium E5200 CPU at 2.5GHz and US$84. The company will also launch a 65nm Conroe-L-based Celeron 450 CPU at 2.2GHz and US$53, according to sources at motherboard makers.

In addition to launching new products, the company is also planning to offer a price drop in mid October for CPUs including the Q8200, which will drop from US$224 to US$203, Core 2 Quad Q6600 from US$193 to US$183, Core 2 Duo E7300 from US$133 to US$113, Pentium E2220 from US$84 to US$74 and Pentium E2200 from US$74 to US$64, noted the sources. In the third quarter of this year, Intel's 45m Core 2 Quad CPU series will account for 6% of the company's total desktop CPU shipments, while 45nm Core 2 Duo E8000 and E7000 series will account for around 16% and 13%, respectively. 45nm Pentium E5000 series will account for less than 2% and Atom 200 series only 3%.

Nvidia Corp., the second-largest maker of computer graphics chips, yesterday posted its first quarterly loss in six years. The shares jumped in late trading after the company said it boosted a share buyback program by $1-billion (U.S.). The second-quarter loss of $120.9-million, or 22 cents a share, compared with a profit of $172.7-million, or 29 cents, a year earlier, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia said yesterday. The stock was trading up nearly 11% when the market opened with this news.

“Our Q2 financial performance was disappointing. The desktop PC market around the world weakened during the quarter. And our miscalculation of competitive price position further pressured our desktop GPU business. We have a great product line-up and, having taken the necessary pricing actions, we are strongly positioned again. Our focus now is to drive cost improvements and to further enhance our competitiveness through the many exciting initiatives we have planned for the rest of the year,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA. “In contrast, the rest of our businesses did not exhibit the same dynamics as our desktop business. The notebook GPU, MCP, and Professional Solutions groups grew a combined 27 percent year-over year.”

The Inq has posted up another story about faulty NVIDIA graphics cards and this time around they are making a big claim. They are saying that the Geforce 8800GT, 8800GTS, 8800GS, mobile 8800's, most of the 9800 suffixes, and a few 9600 models are all failing at a higher than normal rate. They go on to say that all G92 and G94 variants are susceptible to the same problem – basically they are all defective. They don't give any specific details on the problem and some of their readers have commented on this. One reader left the comment; “I've been reading these articles with some interest but now your articles are starting to read like a vendetta [against NVIDIA]”. We'll see what our research can dig up and post an update later today.

A little digging revealed what this, and more, is all about, and it's far uglier than just the 'notebook' version. It seems that four board partners are seeing G92 and G94 chips going bad in the field at high rates. If you know what failures look like statistically, they follow a Poisson distribution, aka a bell curve. The failures start out small, and ramp up quickly – very quickly. If you know what you are looking for, you can catch the signs early on. From the sound of the backchannel grumblings, the failures have been flagged already, and NV isn't playing nice with their partners.

NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 200 series of graphics cards have undergone a significant price reduction since they first debuted.  At the time, NVIDIA flexed its GPU muscle with a high-end, single GPU graphics design that their primary competition (AMD) could only compete with by throwing two GPUs at the problem.  As such, NVIDIA initially priced their flagship GeForce GTX 280 at a significant premium; $649 upon its introduction on launch day.  Would you believe us, if we told you back then, that these

There was a time when  many people would have bet on Gateway to become the largest direct retailer of computers in America instead of Dell. They had a funky vibe going with their black and white cow-spotted boxes, and the future seemed very bright indeed. That future never materialized, and Gateway was acquired by Acer last year for a comparatively modest 710 million dollars. Now Gateway has completely ended the business model that put them on the map: Direct Sales. “We believe that our retail and

… but they’re still not a monopoly, at least if you ask the company. On Monday researchers at market research firm Hitwise released their monthly search share report, and their data indicates that Google has now topped 70% in terms of search market share.Google reached a new milestone and accounted for 70.77 percent of all U.S. searches. Google’s share of searches increased 10% over the same month last year and 2% over the previous month. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search (including Live.com), and Ask followed with

In case you’re not wise in the ways of aftermarket Velcro, Logitech now offers a cordless laser mouse, the V550, that clips right on the cover of your laptop. They call it the Clip-and-Go Dock. Logitech makes excellent aftermarket peripherals, and this looks to be another one of the little conveniences that are the bread and butter of their business. Always ready for use, the V550 Nano also features the Plug-and-Forget Nano-receiver – it’s so small that once it’s plugged into your computer, you can forget about

The 9600GT is one of the premier mid-range graphic cards on the market today. The XFX GeForce 9600GT XXX Edition takes this mid-range card and pumps up performance with a factory overclock and non-reference cooler. Read on to see how the XFX GeForce 9600 GT 512MB DDR3 XXX Alpha Dog does against the more expensive GeForce 8800 GT graphics card in a number of games!

It didn't take long for Intel to see our news post about NVIDIA takling about Intel's Larrabee chip and they have sent over a response for us to publish. They didn't directly answer the questions NVIDIA asked, but at least we know they are paying close attention to the situation!

Intel has never said the GPU is dying or that it is a shrinking market. We are happy that Nvidia thinks that Larrabee has 'enormous floating point processing power'. Although it should be specified that on top of this power, Larrabee's x86 architecture will make it easy to program too, allowing the world's programmers to harness that power.